Steve Lonegan let down: North Carolina, here I come

Saed Hindash/The Star-LedgerSigns left behind at the East Brunswick Hilton following Steve Lonegan's party and his run for New Jersey Republican candidate for governor ended at the East Brunswick Hilton.

At the Lonegan headquarters last night I imagined some guy with a microphone running up to me to ask a question. "Now that Chris Christie has won the Republican nomination for governor, where are you going to go?"

I won't say "Disney World." I hate amusement parks.

"I'm going to North Carolina," I'll reply.

Seriously, I am. I'm taking next week off anyway and I was planning on visiting my brother in D.C. But I suddenly feel a need to start checking out the real estate down by Cape Hatteras. Business is fleeing the state and we residents may soon have to follow.

That might have changed if we had a tough, conservative pro-business governor like former Bogota mayor Steve Lonegan. But after Chris Christie's win in the Republican gubernatorial primary last night, we now face the unpleasant truth that the governor of this state next year will be either a liberal politician who tells the truth about his tax-and-spend policies or a liberal politician who lies about his tax-and-spend policies.

I realize that is a harsh assessment of the Christie campaign. But it is not quite as harsh as the assessment of the Wall Street Journal in a recent editorial on this race: "Christie's cheap shots hurt everyone" was the headline.

The cheap shot in question was his effort, apparently successful, to convince New Jersey voters that a tax cut is a tax hike. The Lonegan 2.9 percent flat income-tax plan represented both a big cut in tax rates and a small cut in tax receipts. Yet Christie's entire campaign centered on distorting those facts.

During his concession speech last night at the Hilton in East Brunswick, Lonegan politely glossed over that fact as he gave his endorsement to Christie. He said that early in the campaign he had made a "calculated decision to tell the taxpayers what they need to make New Jersey an economic powerhouse once again."

"But the message was not clear enough and I take responsibility for that," he said.

But if Lonegan made a mistake, it was the one H.L. Mencken warned against long ago, overestimating the intelligence of the American public.

The theme of the campaign was set on a February afternoon in the Statehouse in Trenton when the candidates had dueling news conferences. Christie went first and spewed platitudes for 20 minutes. After announcing "a comprehensive plan to completely restructure state spending here in New Jersey" he proceeded to do nothing of the sort. Instead he piled cliche upon cliche, saying things like "we intend to change entirely the way the state puts the budget together" and "we will start at zero" and that he would impose "systematic programmatic review on the state level."

This was a clever tactic. It put the assembled journalists into such a slumber that none asked a pertinent question.

Later that afternoon Lonegan got up and gave a speech packed with specifics. Hardly a sentence lacked numbers attached to the assertions. A typical assertion was that 336,000 people had left the state taking with them $12 billion in income.

He proposed a cure, a flat tax that with a rate lower than our neighbors' rates.

Several reporters asked whether his proposal would mean that some lower-income residents would pay higher taxes. Lonegan then did something that I doubt a single other major political figure in America would do: He said yes.

Lonegan no doubt expected, as did I, that the proposal would be attacked by liberal Democrats arguing that he was cutting taxes for the rich. Instead, the attack came from a liberal Republican. Christie barraged the state with ads attacking the flat tax to the point that he "sounds like he's reading from President Obama's teleprompter" in the words of that Journal editorial.

The scare tactic worked, however, as did an even more slippery tactic. Lonegan had noted, truthfully, that the state no longer has the money to send property-tax rebates to homeowners. That's because income tax receipts are plummeting, and the rebates are paid out of the income tax. Yet Christie proposed to restore the rebates - and also cut the income tax to the point receipts will fall even further.

This is mathematically impossible. Throughout the campaign I kept hammering him for some explanation. It never came. Meanwhile the media ripped Lonegan's very specific plan while letting Christie get away with promising "tax cuts for everyone."

When it comes to Christie, my fellow journalists never awoke from that mid-winter slumber. But I suspect they will now that his opponent is a liberal Democrat rather than a conservative Republican. In 2005, Jon Corzine easily beat the mainstream Republican gubernatorial candidate, Doug Forrester, when he put forward a ludicrous tax proposal. This race looks like a repeat.

But even if Christie wins, what would he do to save the state? The reason he won't say, I suspect, is that he doesn't know.